Letters

I have been using Webmin for a couple years now to administer
my servers. It is a wonderful and powerful tool. I was very pleased
to read about it in your December 2001 issue (“Webmin: Good for
Guru and Newbie Alike”). Mr. Elmendorf did a great job. I hope to
hear more on Webmin in the future in the pages of
LJ. Like, how to add modules and such. Great
work!

—Jody “JoLinux” Harvey

Thanks David Bandel

Thanks so very much for your article “Taming the Wild
Netfilter” in Linux Journal (September 2001)
regarding iptables. I've been banging my head on a wall to come up
with a clean solution for protecting my home network from internet
kiddies. Your script (with some modification) is a pleasure to work
with. All I had to do is add some accepts for a couple of ports on
the Linux box and voilà! Your tutorial
is excellent!

—Don Lafontaine

Empirical Knowledge

This comment is a little frivolous, but still worth an
e-mail. At the end of his article “Mainstream Linux”, December
2001 issue of LJ, Robin Rowe quotes Linus as
saying, “Software is like sex: it's better when it's free.” I
read the quote to my wife and her immediate reaction went something
like this: “How does he know? If what he says is true, then he
must have paid for it sometime in his past!”
Whoops! Choose your words carefully, Linus!

—Paul Barry

Confronting the Frontier

While Editor in Chief Richard Vernon has every right to
support the Electronic Frontier Foundation and to encourage his
readers to do the same, he should be more forthcoming about the
positions taken by the Foundation [see “EEF Wants You”, December
2001 issue of LJ]. The Foundation is about
more than protecting open-source programming. It is also about
preventing public libraries from filtering web content for children
and allowing crackers to freely distribute the means to steal
proprietary programming in the name of free speech. Before joining
or contributing, I would urge readers to examine the positions of
the Foundation and the writings of its cofounder, John Perry
Barlow, by visiting its web site. Love the magazine,
otherwise.

—Bill Moylan

What exactly does “the means to steal proprietary
programming” mean? A tool that lets you view DVDs on Linux? A
debugger? If anything that can be used to infringe copyright should
be banned, then we have no Linux left. We too urge readers to
examine the Foundation's positions by visiting its web site
(www.eff.org)--the more
they read about the EFF, the better.

—Editor

Love the Beans

After reading your last two articles in Linux Journal on using JBoss [see Reuven Lerner's December
2001 and January 2002 At the Forge column], I just have to say,
“excellent job!” Your articles are really a pleasure to read, and
I've passed them along to other developers here as well as our
director, and they agree. We're starting to consider how to get
JBoss accepted here as an approved platform for Kaiser Permanente
Hospitals (Kaiser has about 110,000 employees here in the United
States). I'm greatly looking forward to your treatment of Zope.
Keep up the superb work!

—Cole Thompson

Flying LTO

I was pleased to see the review of the HP SureStore Ultrium
230 tape drive in the December 2001 issue. The company that I work
for currently is considering Qualstar TLS tape libraries for use on
our data collection platforms. After reading the article, it
appears that this might not be such a good idea. I was wondering if
anyone has had any experience using robotic tape libraries on
moving platforms such as ships or aircraft?

We have successfully deployed HP SureStore Ultrium 230 tape
drives on our ships and are extremely happy with their performance.
The “Open” part of LTO is what originally drew us to this drive.
With multiple vendors for both the drives and the media, the prices
should prove to be competitive. The price for the media has already
come down significantly from launch. We tested a RAIDZONE RS-15 1TB
NAS with a directly attached HP SureStore Ultrium 230 tape drive.
The actual throughput we got was 13MB/sec using GNU tar. This works
out to about 46GB/hour (pretty close to the advertised rate). The
NAS had no problem supplying the data to the drive. In fact, it was
coasting most of the time.

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